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Is English 'NOT' your first language?

Having been trying to learn Japanese and/or Chinese for the past 18 months, i've often wondered how how hard English ios to learn to for a non-native speaker. I know They have a strict course in Japan, and many other East Asian Countries, but what about other European countries, or Indo/Asian sub-continent?

ABout 30% of the planet speaks English (I think) Chinese is spoken just a little bit more then that. Wouldn't it make more sense if we all spoke Chinese? (thougn with all complications in it's writing system, maybe English is the world's language)

Also, can anyone speak Esperanto?

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Having been trying to learn Japanese and/or Chinese for the past 18 months, i've often wondered how how hard English ios to learn to for a non-native speaker. I know They have a strict course in Japan, and many other East Asian Countries, but what about other European countries, or Indo/Asian sub-continent?

ABout 30% of the planet speaks English (I think) Chinese is spoken just a little bit more then that. Wouldn't it make more sense if we all spoke Chinese? (thougn with all complications in it's writing system, maybe English is the world's language)

Also, can anyone speak Esperanto?

We learn English from the 5th grade on till the 12th as primary foreign language and in most school forms you have to pick up a second foreign language at 8th grade (I had the choice between Latin, Italian and French) , sometime with a special program for latin starting in 6th grade (we could choose between Latin and "representing geometry" (basically like normal geometry without calculation, you have to construct everything on paper).

Personally I did not find English that hard - I stayed a year in the US (exchange student, even got a High School Diploma) and was in the English Honors class. This only applies to English though, the little I can speak in Italian would fill every native Italian with rage for its bad grammar and pronounciation.

I do not thing that Chinese will be thaught as compulsory language in schools - I think English is much easier to learn, if not only because it uses the same alphabet.

Dutch people start learning english at about 9-10 years old, and in most cases take english classes 1-3x / week all the way up to highschool graduation at 16-18. By this time most are able to communicate in the language, though spelling, pronounciation, and word order mistakes are very often. Vocabulary is usually ok, but not great.

Dutch universities usually teach from english books, with classes taught in dutch, which raises the standard of university graduates english' quite a bit. Of course, almost all scientific articles are english too.

Most dutch people have the most basic of abilities in german and french, barely enough to form coherent sentences.

Note that the dutch language is based on the german one, but due to war and trade heavily, heavily influenced by both english and french (as well as having many yiddish words), which makes learning each of these languages easier, but sometimes harder to master because dutch adheres to to each 3 partially, and often the wrong kind of grammar is used instinctively.

A recent report suggests that the average level of english is going down a bit, blaiming MSN/texting shorthand language for a decrease in exposure to language, as well as many music being more slang then english.

My english is definitely above average though, due to longterm exposure to just about every media (TV, books, internet, music) and family situation (Father remarried to an british woman, and grandmothers whole family living in US/Canada, coming over regularly (and their children only speaking english)).

English is one of our primary classes in Swedish schools. I don't have the exact numbers, because I forget things, but we spend a lot of years at both young ages and in the later teens learning english.

Apparently english is a hard language to learn because of the combinations of letters than sound differently. For instance, though and thought.

Though really, the more different a language is from the native language, the more difficult it will be to learn. For instance, english will be easier to learn for a Frenchman than a Chinese person, simply because of language similarities.

Apparently english is a hard language to learn because of the combinations of letters than sound differently. For instance, though and thought.

Though really, the more different a language is from the native language, the more difficult it will be to learn. For instance, english will be easier to learn for a Frenchman than a Chinese person, simply because of language similarities.

One fun thing about dutchmen and english is the fact that one of the most common sounds in english ( the th, as in "the" or "thought") is not a sound in dutch at all, and thus almost always mispronounced because of it. You can spot a dutchman speaking english a mile away thanks to that.

I've found that most of the Dutch people I surround myself with know enough English to hold a basic conversation, but I'm really not sure how much actual high school classes factor into that. Many students get horrible grades for it and the classes pretty much cover the same material, over and over, for the better part of the formal education. All the people I know who are actually proficient at English are either 40+ or have learned the language through a combination of literature, tv and videogames.

Dutch universities usually teach from english books, with classes taught in dutch, which raises the standard of university graduates english' quite a bit. Of course, almost all scientific articles are english too.

At least at the RUG (University of Groningen) they actually teach master courses in english if there are foreign students present - I don't know how it works normally, but they asked if foreign students were participating at the beginning of each course.

Dutch universities usually teach from english books, with classes taught in dutch, which raises the standard of university graduates english' quite a bit. Of course, almost all scientific articles are english too.

At least at the RUG (University of Groningen) they actually teach master courses in english if there are foreign students present - I don't know how it works normally, but they asked if foreign students were participating at the beginning of each course.

I wish I'd taken Swedish at [9-yrs-old] and English at [14-yrs-old] rather than the other way around. I really learned English for the video games and later on there was the internet. But now I know shit about Swedish.

Which is kinda stupid seeing as how Swedish is the second official language around here and compulsory in the university, useful for getting some jobs, etc. etc.

May I remind you people that there's a huge difference between "learning English in school" and "being able to converse in English"?

In Germany its mostly the same as in, say, Austria. English lessons from 5th to 13th grade.
But from my experience, the language (or any language) isn't very well taught in school.
I'm in 12th grade and have English as my intensive course (5 fucking hours a week). Out of 14 people, I'm the only one who can speak fluently, which is sad.
We're going to read Macbeth next year. People are pretty much fucked understanding that.

Luckily for me, my mom supported my interest in the language from a very early age.

Edit: Also, French is no language. It is some sort of torture. "It sounds good" my ass.

Ferrus on May 2007

I would like to pause for a moment, to talk about my penis.

My penis is like a toddler. A toddler—who is a perfectly normal size for his age—on a long road trip to what he thinks is Disney World. My penis is excited because he hasn’t been to Disney World in a long, long time, but remembers a time when he used to go every day. So now the penis toddler is constantly fidgeting, whining “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? How about... now?”
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.

It makes more sense to learn English than Chinese because you could only use your Chinese if you went to China. In fact (if you already know English) it would make more sense to learn Spanish than Chinese, since it has a pretty wide distribution and still a large number of speakers - more native speakers than English. Spanish is also more similar to English than Chinese is, and is more similar to a number of other languages.

I tried learning Esperanto a few years ago with Kurso de Esperanto. Eventually I got bored since I had no one to speak to, but it's a very good program - it has sound samples, games etc - and the language is very easy to learn. I still remember most of the grammar and vocabulary I picked up because of how logical it all is.

One fun thing about dutchmen and english is the fact that one of the most common sounds in english ( the th, as in "the" or "thought") is not a sound in dutch at all, and thus almost always mispronounced because of it. You can spot a dutchman speaking english a mile away thanks to that.

And those two th's are actually different sounds, so it's no wonder they have trouble!

One fun thing about dutchmen and english is the fact that one of the most common sounds in english ( the th, as in "the" or "thought") is not a sound in dutch at all, and thus almost always mispronounced because of it. You can spot a dutchman speaking english a mile away thanks to that.

Same for Swedish. Nearly everyone uses an "d", "f" or "v" sound instead of "th".

I started English as second language in 4th grade, though I began earlier since my family was among the first to get a satellite dish when they became affordable. Hooray, English cartoons all day long! That gave me a solid base for when the proper education started.

I work at a writing center and I often tutor ESL students (I'm there right now actually), and for the most part, even students from a language background that has little in common with English can pick up conversational English pretty quickly. However, it seems to take much longer to develop strong writing skills, because English is a horrible horrible mess when it comes to grammatical rules. It is easy to convey meaning, but it's very hard to get the particularities and details of a correct sentence. Have you ever explained to someone how to use the definite and indefinite articles, and when to use which? It is a nightmare.

I'd say that English is a major second language in the Philippines. Taught as early as kindergarten alongside Filipino, 5 days a week. Most of us here have that hard accent, though not as thick as the usual Indian or Chinese accent.

My sister is a cunning linguist, doing her masters. She told me that one of the biggest problems in language education is that the older a student gets, the more drastically the difficulty of learning new languages increases. Starting to teach languages is high school is effectively useless.

I was planning on learning how to speak Chinese starting next semester because you know, China is the world's next superpower and stuff bla bla bla, but then I read this article that Chinese is extremely hard to learn because it has like 4000 characters and you only learn about 150 a year, so you'd basically never be able to become really fluent in it. Also, the article said that more Chinese people are learning how to speak English than non-Chinese people are learning how to speak Chinese, so it`d basically be pointless anyway because English would remain the number one language in international business and such. DOes anyone know if these two claims are really true and if it`s really pointless to try and learn Chinese as a non-native speaker for these two reasons? Also, what would be a good alternative? (I still want to learn an additional foreign language besides the ones I already know -- German, English and Dutch.) Spanish, French or Japanese maybe?

French is my first language and I still don't know half the rules on grammar and verb conjugation.

It's overcomplicated and there's a word for everything.

Yeah, I remember asking French people questions about conjugations, and getting a response of "I have no fucking clue."

Another thing worth noting is that "Chinese" isn't really a language, but a language family. Mandarin and Cantonese have less in common than a lot of different languages do, even though they're considered dialects.

I was exposed to English early (my parents are Canadian) but we went overseas when I was 3.5. Some classes were in English, but most of my exposure to it was through movies and tv.

Language was an important part of the culture while growing up. You were expected to know the trade language, the local village language, and a few of the nearby dialects. In my part of the world, friends develop thier own language to speak with each other (like slang times ten), and serious discussion circles also have thier own language. Acceptance in the culture is largely based on your ability to manipulate the sounds in the language you are speaking (like accents) so there is a great deal of pressure to be able to handle sound and meaning very well, so that it sounds like how the other person sounds.

It would be like affecting a Texan accent if you were in Texas, or speaking to a Texan. You would be expected to switch up to something different if you then spoke to a Midwesterner or Finn. I often get remarks like, 'You don't sound like you have an accent'. I should hope not, I'm probably using yours. My accent appears in the way I use words, and this is the hardest part I have found about using English. If I'm not speaking directly to someone, my own structure and usage follows its own flow, which can seem a bit disjointed sometimes.

People have completely different meanings in thier heads about what particular words mean. Different shades of meaning, connotations, are present everywhere. Everybody who speaks English thinks they are speaking English, but its not really true. They are really speaking in the flavour of English they learned while growing up in wherever they are from, and the meanings they use are really only the same as those who grew up in that same situation. Because English has such a wide geographic base, there are hundreds if not thousands of flavours, each very difficult to identify because the words are the same, and used in roughly the same way.

The structure of English is precise enough to get a firm grip on it relatively easily. Its sort of like math. There is a right and wrong answer. The meaning of English is really very flexible depending on context, which is why it makes a very nice language to use to basically communicate. This flexibility in meaning also makes it harder to be precise or subtle however, because you can't use specific English words and expect that their meaning, their undermeaning, and thier associated reference to specific context will be the same to each listener.

I find when using English, there is a lot of ritual conversation around clarification. This is a good thing, and common in other languages as well. It is a weird juxtaposition of assumption and demand. In tokpisin, or Kaoan, if we were were using the word 'dog', and it came to mean 'scroungy strays poking about' in our conversation, in every conversation thereafter, 'dog' would mean that, and there would be a specific sound to indicate that there was an altered meaning if ithat word was used or needed again. Many English speakers dennote these changes to 'slang', and still hold to the original usage in common speech, even when with the same person.

My mind was blown one day on the Intertron when there became an argument about the specific definition of a word, and how it must be used in a disscussion. To me, this was very insulting behaivor, because 'common courtesy' (or my idea of it)is to simply agree on the definition between us, and move on with the discussion, using that word as it has been defined in the context of our conversation. It became clear there were cultural differences in play, because a big deal was made about how other people had defined that word, and we should bow to them even though they are not here, and how there should or cannot be any leeway in usage or understanding.

It seemed like bullshit at the time, and also a very anti-social attitude to have about one's language, but I've come to understand that English speakers have a sort of deep desperation for the standardization of thier language, because more often than not, they aren't in direct contact with whomever they are talking to. It always a corporate rep, or a panel of judges, or legalese, or whatever faceless one-way conversation they happen to be having at the time. Current cultural demands require the standardization of terms to be governed by an external authority so that very large groups of people can communicate with more clarity.

Its not as intimate or as meaningful as wantok, a personally developed method of speech between friends or partners, but I don't think it can be, just due to inefficiencies of scale. To know English is to also know an International and localized melange of pop references and cultural icons. Usage and definitions go hand in hand, and like any other language, using it effectively is more of an art form than a demonstration of knowledge. I find it simpler to use than any other language I know (5 in total, and as many dialects) but I find its mastery exceptionally challenging. T

The basics seem easy, but once it hits a certain level of usage the learning curve gets really steep. The standardization means you can hit about 90% comprehension between two strangers paying attention using the same basic vocabulary. With flexibility in context, you can run as high as 96% between familiar friends. Drop in some aggressive slang between really close friends and you can push that understanding up to the very high nineties. This level of understanding English between people takes years to develop, in part because of the lack of flexibility in certain incidences, and only exists between set groups. Much slower than some (kaoan takes only a few weeks to develop to this same level, NorthAm relationships progress at what seems like superslomo to me), but it seems a very good balance between personal need and business/infrastructure interpersonalization in a modern setting.

It makes more sense to learn English than Chinese because you could only use your Chinese if you went to China. In fact (if you already know English) it would make more sense to learn Spanish than Chinese, since it has a pretty wide distribution and still a large number of speakers - more native speakers than English. Spanish is also more similar to English than Chinese is, and is more similar to a number of other languages.

I tried learning Esperanto a few years ago with Kurso de Esperanto. Eventually I got bored since I had no one to speak to, but it's a very good program - it has sound samples, games etc - and the language is very easy to learn. I still remember most of the grammar and vocabulary I picked up because of how logical it all is.

English is also the accepted language of international business and tourism. You go anywhere in the world that has tourists and more than likely you'll find people who can speak some English.

Oh right, tahnks for reminding me about that. I was talking about Mandarin.

I have a friend that is a couple of years older than me and she took Mandarin classes at my university for a couple of years. She's fluent, for the most part, and has lived in China the past two summers. She can read pretty much anything in pinyin and know how to pronounce it, it's just the characters take forever to learn. But that's like any character-based language, and isn't just a feature of Chinese.

If you want to take it, I say, take it. Just be prepared to listen hard. All those tones are crazy.

I have a friend from Sweden who was taugh from 7 or so, and she speaks better English than me (having said that, I speak like a cross between the Wurzels and Mal from Firefly)

Conversely, friends from Slovakia who learnt when they were 20ish in adult learning centres speak bloody awful English, (Alica, the best of them, often has to translate for me because I speak so fast).

I guess it depends on how young you are. I don't look forward to brushing up on my German, since I've not spoken it since I was like, 15.

Had to take English classes in Sudan starting in the 4th grade. Came to the US when I was beginning high school, and was really worried about my prospects and having to study more "advanced" grammar, but it was just a breeze. It was the first my language classes became easier than my math classes. Arabic grammar was just torture.

I started to learn English words really early (I was 7 or something), we had to learn it in school around the age of 10, but I was way ahead of most people. Thank you videogames. I'm still ahead of most people in college. Thank you webforums and Ventrilo.

I see we have some other people here who studied or are studying in the Netherlands, if I may ask, do your teachers suck at English? I almost filed a complaint against the teachers of one course for sucking so much that the complete class thought they were joking at first.

I started to learn English words really early (I was 7 or something), we had to learn it in school around the age of 10, but I was way ahead of most people. Thank you videogames. I'm still ahead of most people in college. Thank you webforums and Ventrilo.

I see we have some other people here who studied or are studying in the Netherlands, if I may ask, do your teachers suck at English? I almost filed a complaint against the teachers of one course for sucking so much that the complete class thought they were joking at first.

My own accent is absolutely horrifying (seriously, it doesn't even sound like a Dutch accent, it's like my voice is deliberately trying to make your ears explode), so I'm not really in a position to criticize anyone, but I've found that a lot of teachers have pretty awful accents.

My own accent is absolutely horrifying (seriously, it doesn't even sound like a Dutch accent, it's like my voice is deliberately trying to make your ears explode), so I'm not really in a position to criticize anyone, but I've found that a lot of teachers have pretty awful accents.

I think I'm in a position to complain because I'm not getting paid for giving lectures in the Dutch variant of Engrish. D:

French is my first language and I still don't know half the rules on grammar and verb conjugation.

It's overcomplicated and there's a word for everything.

French has a word for everything; English has twelve words for everything, many of which have the exact same meaning and connotation. English has different words for the same thing, for the sake of having different words. It's kind of stupid. It also has a number of annoying homonyms/homophones/etc.

I like French because it has come up with rules for everything. You may find the rules excessive, but it's better than not having the rules. An example of the problems such things can generate: where I work, French speaking students can use a program called Antidote that can evaluate sentence structure, word usage, etc, according to French rules of grammar. No such program existed for English until very recently, and the ones that have come out are mostly inadequate, because there are no rules for them to program into the language. In order to make the program effective, they would have to come up with new rules for the language, or discover and transcribe every single unspoken but accepted rule for the language - most of which vary wildly by region.